A year's distance offers some perspective on the events of 11 September 2001. It seems more and more likely that Osama bin Laden chose such spectacular attacks specifically to inspire Muslims worldwide to unite behind him, so that he could become emperor of the Muslim world. That did not preclude numerous attempts to kill Americans and to disrupt the United States more generally, but it does provide perspective on the wider war against terrorism—which is a war to make the United States and, by extension, the West, secure against a future 11 September. Osama and al Qaeda may well be destroyed, but they merely were tapping a wider current of hatred for the United States and the West. An alternative formulation would be that Osama will have successors, because the feelings he tapped are widespread. Because so much of the hatred is really a furious reaction to modernization in the world (which the United States leads, and for which it often is held responsible), it is unlikely that the hatred itself can be assuaged. Only time can do that. We can, however, convince those who hate us that large-scale attacks are pointless, and that no terrorists and no regime harboring terrorists can stand up to us. One regime in particular, that of Saddam Hussein, is seen in much of the Arab world as exemplifying successful resistance against the United States. In that sense, Iraqi success against us becomes a likely rallying point for future Osamas, even though Saddam's is a secular regime that Osama would have abhorred.
That is why some in President George W. Bush's cabinet pressed for action against Iraq as part of the immediate reaction to the 11 September attacks. At that time, the President decided to concentrate on one objective at a time, and thus to deal with al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts. Any decision on Iraq was deferred. A year later, it is possible that the chief authors of the outrage, Osama bin Laden and his closest advisor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are both dead. Al Qaeda cells still exist, but the organization has been damaged badly. For al Qaeda to revive, it needs a new host government. Much depends on whether potential hosts believe they can ride out U.S. displeasure.
Osama's attack on the United States can be perceived as a symptom of a widespread view in the Arab world that the United States can be attacked almost with impunity. Demonstrations of such effective impunity, as advertised by Osama bin Laden, included U.S. withdrawal from Somalia in 1993 after 18 Americans were killed (over the pleas of the U.S. Army to avenge those deaths); the failure to avenge the attack on the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996; the ineffectual 1998 missile attacks on Afghanistan and the Sudan in revenge for the destruction of two U.S. embassies in Africa; and the failure to avenge the attack on the USS Cole (DDG-67) in 2000.
It might seem that the Gulf War showed that the United States was prepared to meet attacks with force. Many, however, see Saddam Hussein as the chief beneficiary of U.S. restraint, which in the Arab world apparently often translates to cowardice, not prudence. True, the U.S.-led coalition ejected Saddam from Kuwait in 1991, but 11 years later he still is in power. From his point of view, often trumpeted in the Muslim world, he, not the United States, won the Gulf War, because he is still in power. Twice he has proved that U.S. pressure could be defied with few or no consequences. Once was in Kurdistan, in 1996, where his army crushed political opposition despite a declared U.S. policy of protection. A second was in 1998, when he ejected the U.N. weapons inspectors who were thwarting his program of developing weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them.
From the point of view of many governments, the chief role of the United Nations is to restrain very powerful states from dealing with them, not to enforce any sort of universal international law, although resolutions might be clothed in that language. Restraint is the outcome of a bargaining process. If the U.N. becomes simply an obstacle to the one superpower, then the United States may be inclined to defy U.N. edicts. Thus the United States sometimes gets its way—some U.N. resolutions reflect the U.S. view of justice. Those demanding Iraqi disarmament fall into this category. It is, however, a mistake to imagine that the passage of such resolutions means that other governments generally accept our view of international justice. It is less than clear that many other governments will be willing to support the destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime. Some critics of a potential war in Iraq have pointed out that Saddam is only one of numerous odious dictators. Why should the United States stop with him? Why should the others welcome his destruction?
The Gulf War victory achieved the one objective on which all of the coalition partners agreed: Saddam's army was ejected from Kuwait. The U.S. government of the day seems to have expected the measures put into place to solve the issues of disarmament and Saddam. One condition of the cease-fire that ended the war was Iraqi disarmament through U.N. inspection. In 1998, Saddam demonstrated clearly that the wartime coalition, led by the United States, lacked the stomach to enforce its side of the bargain: the inspectors were ejected, but the ceasefire was not breached by the coalition partners. Another condition of the cease-fire was the imposition of no-fly zones, which were intended to prevent Saddam from quashing likely rebellions among the Kurds of the north and the Shiites of the south. Even if such rebellions did not tear Iraq apart, the potential for rebellion would, it was hoped, force Saddam to moderate his dictatorship and to spend his money on his population rather than on military adventures. Unfortunately, the terms of the cease-fire were bungled. Saddam was allowed to fly helicopters in the no-fly zones. They were used to crush the rebellions that followed the end of the Gulf War. The no-fly zones, however, have survived, and enforcement by U.S. and British aircraft includes frequent air attacks on Saddam's air defenses. Part of the air force that enforces the southern no-fly zone operates from Saudi Arabia, and its presence was one of Osama bin Laden's stated grievances against the United States.
In addition, the United Nations set up an embargo that was intended to prevent Saddam from importing replacements for the military hardware he had lost during the Gulf War. It turned out to be a double-edged sword. Saddam managed to evade the embargo to some extent and rebuild his military, but the Iraqi economy was brutally damaged. Throughout the Arab world, the images of Iraqi children starving as a result of the embargo tended to raise Saddam's prestige and to lower that of the United States, the sternest advocate of the embargo. Worse, like strategic bombing, the embargo probably helped cement the target government's power. Iraqis who suffered badly were unlikely to blame Saddam for their plight, because it was the United Nations, urged on by the United States, that was cutting off their economy. In a weak economy, moreover, Saddam still could supply some important goods to his friends. Thus the embargo actually increased his political power, because it disrupted any other path to even limited prosperity.
U.S. forces probably can defeat the Iraqis quickly. The question is what happens afterward. Iraq has three main ethnic groups: Kurds in the north, Sunnis around Baghdad, and Shiites in the south. Iraq itself was a construct of the post-World War I settlement, without, it seems, much of a national sense of identity. The Kurds have a historic desire for statehood. Unfortunately, a separate Kurdish state would probably draw in large numbers of Turkish and Iranian Kurds. Neither Turkey nor Iran would consider a separate Iraqi Kurdish state acceptable. While the U.S. government might not take Iranian views into account, it would have to depend on Turkey for basing and other critical assistance in any action against Saddam. Moreover, Turkey is an essential ally, and it can be argued that the value of the Turkish alliance exceeds whatever benefits the United States might achieve by destroying Saddam Hussein.
The Shiites in the south are only slightly less problematic. In 1991, the fear was that they would join forces with Shiite Iran. A Shiite victory might well inspire the Shiites living on the Saudi coast of the Gulf, many of them near important oil sites. At the least, a Shiite victory would probably entail a large-scale massacre of Sunni Muslims living in southern Iraq.
The U.S. solution has been to seek a pre-attack agreement among Iraqi émigrés, in hopes that they can form a stable post-attack government, probably on federal lines. Given the extreme stresses within Iraq, the most difficult U.S. task would be to maintain some sort of order in the wake of the attack, while a post-Saddam state took shape. The alternative would be to accept some other dictator in place of Saddam, but that hardly seems likely to be satisfactory.
This is uncomfortably like old-fashioned power politics, the sort of thing the United Nations was conceived to end. In effect, the terrorist attacks told Americans that they had to rely on their own government, not the United Nations or international law, for their safety in a very dangerous world. Many in the military would have said the same thing the day or the year or the decade earlier, but the widespread understanding that events far away could kill thousands at home was new to the public. The Romans are credited with saying that it is better to be feared than loved. Many Americans, including those in government, hoped that they could reverse the adage. The events of 11 September threw that hope into question. Dealing with Saddam is likely to make few real friends, because it will send a message of U.S. power. That is not a comfortable choice to make, but it may, however, be a choice we cannot afford to avoid.